It’s Time to Start Paying Attention to The Knick

It's got a genius antihero lead, an old-timey setting, and Steven Soderbergh—so why the hell aren't more people talking about it?

Season Two of The Knick, a show centered around a New York City hospital in the year 1900, kicks off on Cinemax tonight. Its first season basically had every character, plot point, and dramatic twist you'd want out of a great TV show in 2015. (Minus its weirdly corny last shot of the season.) And yet The Knick got more or less ignored at this year's Emmys. Awards aren't everything, but they do help bring recognition—and eyeballs—to shows, especially when they're on relatively obscure channels like Cinemax, which could explain why it still seems criminally under-watched and under-appreciated by viewers.

Luckily, Season One is on HBO Now for your binge-watching pleasure. (Because, hooray! HBO owns Cinemax.) But if you're still not sure if The Knick is worth your time, here are six reasons you should go under the knife with this razor-sharp drama.

1. Its fascinating setting
The show takes place in turn-of-the-century New York City, and though the buildings, cars, and suits are painstakingly accurate, what stands out is how modern it feels. The Knickerbocker Hospital itself is located on New York's Lower East Side, where street names like Essex and Eldridge are name dropped frequently. The wealthy families—who talk politics over lavish dinners—reside on the Upper East Side, which more or less remains the case 115 years later. But physical setting aside, the themes that pop up on The Knick feel extremely relevant in 2015, and not always in the most comfortable way—racial and religious tensions are a major aspect of the show, as this was a time when immigrants were descending upon New York in the thousands. In one particularly brilliant sequence, NYPD officers assist a riot led by white people in breaking into the Knick to hunt down African-Americans—and it's based on a true story. (To find out the backstory of that situation on the show, you'll have to wait til later in the season.)

2. A compelling antihero
As is the case with so many great modern TV dramas, a genius narcissist with a crippling addiction is The Knick's focal point. Dr. John Thackery, played by Clive Owen, uses his skill with a surgical knife to bail himself out of sticky situations in his personal life on more than one occasion. But like many antiheroes before him, his bad habits eventually catch up with him, leading to mistakes that continue to haunt him into the show's second season.

3. A breakout star
Andre Holland plays the only character arguably more compelling than Dr. Thackery—the African-American surgeon Dr. Algernon Edwards, a brilliant, educated doctor in a city segregated by race. Even Dr. Thackery refuses to let him carry out surgeries in the early part of the season. But none of Algernon's nuances would be believable without the performance of Holland, who we expect to show up a lot more on TV shows and movie screens in the next few years.

4. Strong, beautiful women
The show's most prominent female characters are a nurse played by Eve Hewson and a wealthy philanthropist played by Juliet Rylance. Each is complex in her own way; Hewson's character struggles with a crisis of faith after a proto-sexual awakening (at the borderline-manipulation of Thackery), while Rylance's Cornelia Robertson uses her wealth for good at every turn and is madly in love with Algernon. (Which, predictably, causes all sorts of drama.)

5. The most interesting score on TV
One of the most brilliant parts of The Knick is the score by Cliff Martinez, composer of the scores on several Soderbergh movies (Traffic, Solaris, Contagion) as well as Drive. Though the show takes place in 1900, Martinez's score is entirely electronic, like the soundtrack to a nightmarish molly trip.

6. Steven freakin' Soderbergh
The acclaimed director of Ocean's Eleven, Contagion, and Magic Mike says he retired from filmmaking, but apparently that doesn't mean he isn't willing to do back-breaking amounts of work. Soderbergh not only directed the first season in its entirety (unlike how, say, Martin Scorsese or David Fincher have directed series pilots to lay the tonal and visual groundwork before turning the keys over to someone else), but filmed and edited it, too. What we dig most about his work behind the camera is that it's fluid and almost always hand-held. It's also shot entirely on digital cameras, which move in and out of rooms and frequently highlight the unexpected—whether it's the expression of a person who isn't talking, or a patient who's under the knife.